Monday, August 15, 2011

The Other Side of Creativity

The Rav speaks of man's creative capacity, his unlimited ability to partner with God and also his ability to recreate himself and form a new 'I.'

The Rav does not speak about the other side of creativity. But Henri Nouwen does.

Nuclear man is the man who realizes that his creative powers hold the potential for self-destruction. He sees that in this nuclear age vast new industrial complexes enable man to produce in one hour that which he labored over for years in the past, but he also realizes that these same industries have disturbed the ecological balance and, through air and noise pollution, have contaminated his own milieu. He drives in cars, listens to the radio and watches TV, but has lost his ability to understand the workings of the instruments he uses. He sees such an abundance of material commodities around him that scarcity no longer motivates his life, but at the same time he is groping for a direction and asking for meaning and purpose. In all this he suffers from the inevitable knowledge that his time is a time in which it has become possible for man to destroy not only life but also the possibility of rebirth, not only man but also mankind, not only periods of existence but also history itself. For nuclear man the future has become the only option.

All those who create have the potential to destroy. The Rav addresses only the positive side of creativity, the Teshuva process. What about those who destroy Teshuva? Can one destroy the possibility of rebirth? Did Aher do that? Were his powers so immense that he in fact destroyed Teshuva as a concept when it came to him?

If creativity holds the power- perhaps even the lure- of self-destruction, how is the creative being to act? What prevents him from remaining forever in a position of fear, scared witless?

Perhaps it takes great courage to choose to do anything, fraught as that thing may be with the potential for evil. Perhaps the effort of choosing is the beginning of a fearful journey. Perhaps when our texts say that we all have free will, what it really means is that we can choose to create or to destroy, and our life is lived in that manner. Hence the statements that he who comes to purify himself is helped by God, while he who comes to sin is also helped by God. Also the statement that all is in God's power except the Fear of Heaven. What we value and revere is an expression of our secret self and it is that self who determines what to do with its creativity, the mark they leave on the world.

11 comments:

It depends. At least for me, there is a disconnect between my intellectual thought process and my feelings. I may intellectually value one thing but my emotions lead me towards something else. I think that's where we find the secret things- in what we secretly value or lust after, and that's the place where we want to try to effect change or at least to learn to channel properly.

"the statement that 'all is in God's power except the Fear of Heaven'"I think you've mistranslated. See Brachot 33b Its more like 'all is predestined by Heaven except one's fear of Heaven'After all, what is the value of a god without omnipotence?

Oftentimes it's not the one with the creativity that is faced with the choice of how to use it.It wasn't Einstein that gave the order to bomb Hiroshima.

I believe that it's the creative/passionate sometimes irrational choices that make us truly human and godlike.Logical and intellectual choices are really just an advanced form of animal instinct if you think about it.